New equipment, along with flooring and a paint job with the Titans’ branding, has student-athletes and physical-education students alike excited to hit the weights.

LAKE BUTLER Spanning her 10 years on campus at Olympia High as a coach and, more recently, as the school’s athletic director, Lauren Bradley could not recall the school’s weight room getting much love or attention.

So, in keeping with her initiative to upgrade the Titans’ facilities and branding — a push that has been strongly supported by Principal Guy Swenson — Bradley and her staff have done just that.

Olympia High spent around $60,000 on equipment and remodeling in the weight room. Among other things, the athletics department replaced power racks and other equipment that was more than a decade old, bringing in replacements that take up less space, allowing more athletes to train at once. The room also has received new customized flooring — complete with the Titans’ branding — that are padded thick enough to double as platforms for lifts such as the clean-and-jerk.

“We just got to the point where we wanted to do a complete gut job and renovate everything,” Bradley said.

The renovation, which is functionally complete but will still see a few more additions filtering in, has been appreciated by the school’s athletes and students in physical-education classes.

“They love it,” said Miriam Jones, a teacher on campus and coach of the boys weightlifting team. “They tend to be a lot more careful with the new equipment, and they put things away and they take care of it a lot better.”

The influx of equipment has led to utilizing an adjacent room that had been empty as an overflow weight room. The proximity of both rooms to a breezeway where indoor drills such as sprints can be performed has allowed the school’s many teams to be able to get in offseason strength-and-conditioning sessions at the same time.

“It’s a huge help — we can do more things at once,” Jenkins said.

The upgraded weight room joins the Titans’ resurfaced basketball court among the upgrades Bradley has pushed since becoming athletic director. On Monday, she confirmed more small upgrades are in the works, including additional custom windscreens for the school’s stadium — all as part of a larger push to enhance the school’s branding.

Steven Ryzewski is the Senior Sports Editor for ObserverPreps.com, as well as all three of Observer Media Group's print publications in Orange County. He is a graduate of the University of Central Florida....